If you’re like me, you can’t help but be fascinated by a
good riddle, but also be a little intimidated. Rare is the occasion when I figure out the
answer to the question every good riddle asks: What (or Who) Am I? Riddles traditionally express the most
obvious things—like a good joke—in ways that you may not anticipate. And like a
Marx Brothers joke, they don’t make it easy for you. You may not get them right away, or ever.
Getting them depends on a lot of shared cultural equipment.
Riddles have been with us since the first utterances of the
Greek and Roman oracles. In an oracle, the riddle is fate disguised: think
Oedipus or Macbeth, or the traveler keeping an appointment in Samarra. In this sense, riddles are about intelligence
and recognition, or, to put it in more modern terms, unintended consequences. Poems and riddles of the oracular kind are
cousins. They are speech acts that bear
multiple, sometimes contrary meanings that are not necessarily obvious, and
that therefore reward “close readings.” Most riddles that I’m familiar with,
like jokes, and like poems, but unlike oracles, won’t kill you if you don’t get
them.
Outside of these life and death riddles, there are commonplace
or quotidian riddles, records of daily life.
There exist some 60-70 riddle poems which one scholar describes as “a
series of thumbnail sketches of the daily realisms of Old English life. They
are . . . a listing of the things with which man’s life was woven: the birds
and animals of country life, man’s food and drink, the tools with which he
worked, the armor and weapons with which he fought, his instruments of music.”[1] The surviving examples read more like short
lyric poems than riddles, possibly because they don’t translate so well into
Modern English. Here is an example:
Anchor
Oft I must strive / with wind and wave,
Battle them both / when under the sea
I feel out the bottom / a foreign land.
In lying still / I am strong in the strife;
If I fail in that / they are stronger than I
And, wrenching me loose, / soon put me to rout.
They wish to capture / what I must keep.
I can master them both / if my grip holds out,
If the rocks bring succor / and lend support,
Strength in the struggle. / Ask me my name!
The translator provides the title to this riddle. An Anglo
Saxon wouldn’t have needed or wanted it.
“Riddling” in the Eighth Century was not merely a game of literary hide
and seek but also a specialized use of metaphor. If you recall from our session on it,
metaphor entails an implicitly stated comparison of one thing to another, that
is, without using “like” or “as”: the sun drives his chariot from East to
West. In a riddle, one half of the
comparison is concealed (and sometimes personified) or rendered inexplicit: I
drive my chariot from East to West. And then the inevitable question: What Am
I?
Give it a try. Can
you name the thing this riddle riddles?
My house is not quiet / I am not loud;
But for us God fashioned / our fate together.
I am the swifter, / at times the stronger,
My house more enduring, / longer to last.
At times I rest; / my dwelling still runs;
Within it I lodge / as long as I live.
Should we two be severed, / my death is sure.
Here’s the main thing about riddles, whether they are
expressed lyrically or otherwise: something important is not named. Think of all the poems that Emily Dickinson
wrote in this vein, about the narrow fellow in the grass (snake) or the visitor
in marl . . .
A Visitor in Marl ─
Who influences Flowers ─
Till they are orderly as Busts ─
And Elegant ─ as Glass ─
Who visits in the Night ─
And just before the Sun ─
Concludes his glistening interview ─
Caresses ─ and is gone ─
But whom his fingers touched ─
And where his feet have run ─
And whatsoever Mouth he kissed ─
Is as it had not been ─
Something else that’s peculiar to riddles and especially
riddle poems: clues. All riddles present
clues such that, if you read them carefully enough, you’ll be able to answer
the question, What Am I? And you can
because you are already more or less familiar with the clues presented by the
writer. (Riddle poems are, in this sense, like little detective stories!) The answer to the question What Am I? must be
“discoverable” in the end; otherwise, the riddle is merely obscure, right? The poem below is a famous example of what
I’m talking about. E. E. Cummings wrote it.
The answer to What Am I? depends entirely upon your familiarity with—indeed,
your deep understanding of—typographical culture.
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
─ E. E. Cummings, 1932, 1935
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e
loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint (o-
aThe) :l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea (be)
rran (com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
Now, you might think you get the answer to What Am I? in the
last line of the poem, but that’s only one more clue. So, tell me then: what’s the answer to What Am
I? in this poem?
Finally, here’s a poem whose riddle boggles, until it
doesn’t. It’s by William Heyen.
Riddle
From Belsen, a crate of gold teeth,
from Dachau, a mountain of shoes,
from Auschwitz, a skin lampshade.
Who killed the Jews?
Not I, cries the typist,
not I, cries the engineer,
not I, cries Adolph Eichmann,
not I, cries Albert Speer.
My friend Fritz Nova lost his father—
a petty official had to choose.
My friend Lou Abrahms lost his brother.
Who killed the Jews?
David Nova swallowed gas.
Hyman Abrahms was beaten and starved.
Some men signed their papers,
and some stood guard,
and some herded them in,
and some dropped the pellets,
and some spread the ashes,
and some hosed the walls,
and some planted the wheat,
and some poured the steel,
and some cleared the rails,
and some raised the cattle.
Some smelled the smoke,
some just heard the news.
Were they Germans? Were they Nazis?
Were they human? Who killed the Jews?
The stars will remember the gold,
the sun will remember the shoes,
the moon will remember the skin.
But who killed the Jews?
For next week, then, let’s see whether we can write poems
that function as riddles, that is, in which some central idea or object is not
named but is alluded to, its properties, uses or behavior described, and is
hinted at in other ways.
[1] An Anthology of Old English Poetry,
trans. Charles W. Kennedy. New York: Oxford U Press, 1960. The riddles cited are from a collection
called The Exeter Book.
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